Joshua Juran writes:
Why are there even separate characters for ligatures? Isn't this a display issue?
In the modern (Unicode) world, the purely decorative ligatures (like fi, fl, ff, ffi, ffl) are considered mere “presentation forms”, and they can indeed be just a display issue. The reason they exist in Unicode is to permit lossless round-trip conversion between Unicode and earlier coded character sets, like MacRoman. Such earlier sets predate the existence of display systems that could be expected to do automatic ligation. But you can’t in general automatically substitute ligatures for all sequences of characters that they decompose to. For one thing, you’d need a really good dictionary for each language you intended to support, plus sufficiently accurate metadata to work out which language’s rules to apply in any given situation. It’s not impossible in principle, but it would be absurdly hard in practice. -- Aaron Crane ** http://aaroncrane.co.uk/
